# Getting Into Solo Play tags: #thoughts ![How did you get started in solo play?](https://x.com/jpmccarthyjr/status/1993317817253236973) I came into solo gaming through entirely legitimate means. It was a two-pronged attack. Firstly, solo gaming has a fairly long history on the wargaming side of the world, interestingly enough. Mechanical resolution systems which play the other side in ways which are in accordance with a particular style—aggressive, defensive, patrol, you name it. Table automated, and away you go. The other prong was the fact that after being the omni GM who would run anything you put in front of him for decades, I got tired of it. I was sick to death of GMing. I wanted to play the goddamn game. And I phrase it exactly like that because that's how I felt and continue to feel about it. The rise of GM-less gaming as part of the story gaming evolutionary track was wonderful for me, and for quite a while I specialized in GM-less games. Games where everyone at the table is playing, and everyone at the table is contributing. When those two lines of play started to merge, some awesome things fell out. In particular, the games from *Two Hour Wargames* were fantastic and continue to be good to this very day. *[[5150 - Total War (wargame line)|5150]]* (https://rebelminispress.com/collections/sci-fi-games) is an amazing sci-fi game which literally covers the gamut of man-to-man, squad-on-squad combat all the way up through battalion-on-battalion, orbital operations, and major fleet battles. The only game line I can really think of that competes in that space is *Renegade Legion* (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_Legion), with *Prefect* (https://renegade-legion.fandom.com/wiki/Prefect_(Game)) and all of the other games in the line. *5150* had another side going on with it though, and that was that it was a full-fledged RPG, albeit an extremely lightweight one, and it could be played entirely as an RPG. *[[5150 - New Beginnings|5150: New Beginings]]* (https://twohourwargames.com/collections/5150-sci-fi-rpg) was explicitly sold as a tabletop role-playing game which used the same mechanics as the rest of the line to resolve conflicts. (These days, I would be more likely to classify it as an **"adventure wargame"**, but the term didn't exist at the time.) But that leads us to the rise of games which are explicitly solo/co-op/guided compatible. Specifically, *[[Ironsworn]]* (https://tomkinpress.com/pages/ironsworn) and its science fiction brother, *[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]* (https://tomkinpress.com/pages/ironsworn-starforged). I had been into GM-less games and beginning to shade over into solo gaming before that. But *Ironsworn* in particular hooked hard because of the way it provided oracles which inspire ideas and left it to you as the player to interpret. That is the fruitful void into which you drop your own ideas and your own understanding of the world as it's forming while you describe it. Now we live in an embarrassment of riches of solo and co-op RPGs running the gamut of crunchy, mechanical, near-board game (*2d6 Dungeon*: https://drgames.co.uk/2d6-dungeon-a-classic-dungeon-crawler-solo-player-game/) to extremely fiction-forward, hyper-minimalist systems with game supplements that largely are composed of oracles and inspiration (*[[Loner]]*: https://lonersrd.zotiquestgames.com/#/). The best advice I can give to people who would be new to solo play is relatively simple: stop thinking and start doing. *Don't plan. Don't try to play before you play. Play is the process. Play is the conversation with yourself and the world as you build it.* I see a whole bunch of new solo potentials out there asking in public, *"How do I do this right?"* And it always struck me that they're asking for permission instead of actually playing the game. Don't ask for permission. You're not screwing it up. Just play the damn game. This is advice that applies to all games, mind you, but particularly so in solo games. Stop trying to hit me and hit me. Stop trying to play and play. Quite a lot of the games that I've mentioned, even in this post, are available for free, and I encourage you to go out, grab one, two, or all of them. Sit down and start playing with them. You're going to learn things you never knew. Be ready for it. Be ready to enjoy it.